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Using Analytics to Detect Fraud

One of the most dreaded forms of fraud on the net is click fraud. It costs marketers and advertisers an enormous amount of money each year. Thankfully, you can discover click fraud and protect yourself if you know how. It’s important to do so since click fraud is more than a five billion dollar business.

How Many Clicks from the Same IP Address?

Check to find out how long the clicks have been coming from the same IP address, and compare that to all your other clicks to find out if it’s possible that it’s click fraud. If you check enough, you'll know the pattern for your own website and know when something is wrong so you can block that particular IP address when needed (if it’s a static IP address). You can find this information in your server’s log.

Use a Service Like ClickReport.com

With this service you can find out a lot of information about your PPC activity that you need, such as date, time, IP address, location, keywords and much more. This is a great way to protect your investment in pay-per-click marketing. So much is lost in click fraud so it’s great that you can protect yourself a little better with this service.

Test against Established Parameters

A good example for this to help a lot is to make sure your data entry is accurate. Don’t allow people to input false answers in your forms. For example, if your form requires an address, don’t allow them to put in all 9’s for the zip code. Conversely, you can pull all data with invalid zip codes, check them out further and delete them and block static IPs if you believe they’re fraudulent accounts.

Find Weaknesses in Your System

When you regularly study analytics, patterns emerge and when that happens you can figure out what is causing the issues if there is one. You always need some sort of proof when fraud is happening and the proof is in the data that you have access to and can study.

Analytics Helps Detect and Prevent Fraud

Analytics offer a means by which to detect fraud and even alert you to a problem. If you set up any type of analytics system correctly - even Google AdWords - you can often detect fraud and put a stop to it as soon as possible.

It’s important to do all that you can to stop and prevent fraud. It can affect your profits in enormous ways. It can even cause the ruin of an entire business. But, if you use analytics to detect fraud you can be one of the smart business owners who lowers the damage that it can cause by catching them.

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